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| ▲ | boudin 4 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Flatpak is more of a set of tools and framework. I wouldn't consider it as a store but a distribution system. Flathub is a repository, Fedora has its own repository and anybody can creates its own repo (I wouldn't call it store as there is no concept of monetisation). I wouldn't consider flatpak as a gatekeeper as there is no "team" going through some arbitrary process to allow/disallow an app. I also disagree with the fact that macos and windows did the right thing, what I found in my experience managing laptops in a company that is roughly 1/3 windows, 1/3 linux, 1/3 macos is that:
- What windows is teaching users is to download random stuff and bypass the warning screens if something is not signed. Unless there is a company policy and a third party software to update what is installed, by default things installed are a mix of up to date and not update to date software.
- Macos user do not install operating system and software updates unless a third party software is installed and force them too
- Linux users have things up to date, only distribution version updates (e.g. fedora 41 to fedora 42) are inconsistent. So my take is that, even if things on not perfect with flatpak, rpm/dnf, fwupdmgr and package manager, this is much better than having to pay for third party tools in macos and windows because of the lack of a good way to distribute and maintain apps at the operating system level. | | |
| ▲ | jillesvangurp 4 months ago | parent [-] | | Only fedora can put stuff in their flatpak repository presumably. That makes them a gatekeeper. Why is a repository needed? If it was the same, Mozilla would be able to put a flatpak file for Firefox on their website and it would be the preferred way to install Firefox. Of course everybody (including Mozilla) can create their own repository and then you can install from any repository you like. But how is that different than just downloading whatever and installing that? And that's more of a hypothetical. Mozilla doesn't do that and doing such things is not common. What Apple and MS enforce via signatures is that what you install and run was produced by somebody with a valid certificate that passed their screening. The problem flatpak hasn't solved is that the likes of Mozilla still have no good way to distribute the most recent version of their application to all Linux users. So they put a tar ball on their website instead. | | |
| ▲ | boudin 4 months ago | parent [-] | | Mozilla publishes firefox on Flathub and anybody can install it from there. After, I'm not sure why they don't advertise it, most apps distributed this way just have a button that do so. Fedora has its own repo, they manage it, i don't see the problem there. After it doesn't prevent adding others like flathub and the experience from a user point of view is the same. You can also provide a flatpak ref file that user can use to install. Signing app doesn't means much appart that someone paid for that and went through a process IMO, there's not much value to it from the user pov, especially when the first thing a Windows user learns is to ignore signature warnings. Have you tried using flatpak? |
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| ▲ | lucas_membrane 4 months ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think that you are right about not depending on one open source OS to provide the proper depencencies, customizaion, and training wheels for every app. I have been running linux on my desktop for about 20 years, about one decade of Mint followed by the same of Fedora so far. Being a curious but fussy guy who installs lots of software to see what works, I find that I need to install a fresh OS about every 18 to 24 months. There are, I suppose, always a few programs that don't get upated by 'sudo dnf update' but do get bothered by updates to the shared libraries via the same. Perhaps there are some config files that get damaged by software bugs or power outages or system crashes or my own mistakes and carelessness. I also found out that if one loses the dnf program, one will discover just how impossible it is to pull oneself up by oneself's bootstraps. Mint was a very similar situation. Maybe not so bad for one who follows all the rules, but in those bygone days there were people suggesting that updating Mint programs with newer versions fron the ubuntu or debian repos was a good idea. And because Mint was slow to get updates, I would attempt to update some apps by downloading source and building and installing here. Last year, when I upgraded Fedora from 39 to 41, was the first time I got any OS upgrade to work instead of wiping the disk, doing a fresh install of the new OS version, and then spending a week or month trying to get my data for the installed apps (eg web browser and email) from backups. But the upgrade took much longer than it should have, because once I started running the upgrade process, I did not know that the computer sitting there dead silent with no action on the screen for about 30 hours was a sign that all was going well. Computers are evil. | |
| ▲ | Vilian 4 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | You van havê other repos in flatpak than flathub, so in theory the devs can package their app on their repo and tell the user to install it |
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| ▲ | Arnavion 4 months ago | parent | next [-] | | It doesn't have to be gated by "the people who run the distro". I started packaging a few pieces of software for a distro I use because I wanted to use that software, and I don't "run" the distros in any capacity. Package maintainers aren't born that way, they become that way by volunteering, just like most everything in Linux. If you don't have even one user willing to do that for the distro they use, you probably weren't going to have users on that distro anyway. | | |
| ▲ | troyvit 4 months ago | parent | next [-] | | > Package maintainers aren't born that way, they become that way by volunteering, just like most everything in Linux. I feel like there's a constant tug of war on this issue. If you leave it up to app developers then they have to package their app for N distros. If you leave it up to the distro maintainers then they have to compile N apps for their distro. I don't envy either group given how different distros are and how varied apps are in quality, methodology, etc. I look at Podman. In my opinion it could be (could have been?) a huge disruptor, but its RedHat (or Fedora or CentOS or whatever the hell those guys do now) versions are way higher than versions for other distributions, which creates for me (just a home user) an interoperability problem between all my different Linux boxes. RedHat if anybody has the resources to fix this but I guess they'd rather try to use it as a way to force adoption of their distro? I don't even know. Both the apps and the distros are volunteer-heavy. App packaging is a big job for either side. I'm still hopeful that Flatpak can help that job | |
| ▲ | Ferret7446 4 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a massive waste of resources and time. If you are unwilling to use tools like Flatpak, then that limits what distros you can make. e.g., in a world without Flatpak, only distros with X users can exist. In a world with Flatpak, distros with X/10 users can exist. Another way to think about it: if you want to make/use your own distro, then using Flatpak will cut down the amount of work you have to do by some large multiple. You're free to not use it, just like you're free to install custom electrical sockets in your house and make custom adaptors for every single appliance you buy. Standardization/centralization exists for a reason. |
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| ▲ | palata 4 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're saying the exact opposite of the original point, which is: you should not package for distros, distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources. You are a good candidate to package for your distro, so there's that. And then for a random distro, if nobody feels like packaging for it, then it's just not there. Either there is not enough interest in your project, or there is not enough interest in the distro itself. | | |
| ▲ | curt15 4 months ago | parent | next [-] | | > distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources. Is Devault basically saying that the application developer should just throw their source code over the wall and hope that other parties notice and figure out how to build it correctly? I would find that model of software distribution unsatisfying as a developer because merely distributing a source tarball and leaving the rest to middlemen makes it difficult for me to predict how my users will experience the final product. Even if my product is fully open source and free to fork, it's my reputation on the line when things don't work as intended. I would prefer to establish a more direct relationship with my users; to personally build and test my software in all environments that I support; and to hear directly from users whenever they experience problems. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 4 months ago | parent | next [-] | | > Even if my product is fully open source and free to fork, it's my reputation on the line when things don't work as intended I think that everyone who is worrying about that wants to apply corporate thinking on the open source model. Meaning they want to be a special thing where everything is supposed to be interchangeable. Just yesterday, I was compiling a program that hard depends on the GNU C library for just 2 functions and not even critical one. To be fair, the author said that they only test on Debian. While the linux world may be fragmented, the true differences are mostly minimal (systemd vs other init system, glibc vs musl, networking manager,…) So it’s possible to decouple yourself from these concerns if you want to. But often the developer hard depends on decision made by their preferred distro team, and create a complicated build script that only works there. | |
| ▲ | palata 4 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't know what Devault says, but here is my opinion: do not ship something you don't understand/test/use yourself. Distros should not package random open source projects they don't use/understand, and developers should not package their project for distros they don't use/understand. For both, it's like shipping untested code and the conclusion is always going to be "you should all run the same system I do" or "we should all have the exact same system, let's implement Flatpak". Developers should package their project for the distros they support (often that's just Ubuntu). Random people should package the open source projects they want to use in their distro of choice (the more popular the distro, the higher the chance that someone else has done it already). All that under the supervision of distro maintainers. |
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| ▲ | troupo 4 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | > distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources. That's how you ended up with Erlang being split into 20+ packages on Ubuntu/Debian in the past. Because it was packaged by people who know little about erlang, and had too much time on their hands probably. And that is the main issue: you want distro maintainers to compile and package every single pieces of software under the sun, but they can't possibly know every piece of software, how it works, or how it's supposed to work. Times that by the number of distros. | | |
| ▲ | palata 4 months ago | parent [-] | | > you want distro maintainers to compile and package every single pieces of software under the sun No. I want people who will actually use the package to package the software they need, and distro maintainer to supervise that. > Because it was packaged by people who know little about erlang Yep, people who won't use Erlang shouldn't package Erlang. But on the other hand, developers who won't use Erlang on platform X shouldn't package Erlang on platform X. The "we absolutely need flatpak because otherwise it fundamentally doesn't work" philosophy is, to me, very close to saying "we must consolidate everything under one single OS. Everybody should use the exact same thing otherwise it doesn't work". That's not what I want. I want to have freedom, and the cost of it is that I may have to package stuff from time to time. If you don't want to contribute to your distro, choose a super popular distro where everything is already packaged (and used!). Or use macOS. Or use Windows. You don't get to complain about Alpine Linux not having a package you want: you chose Alpine, that was part of the deal. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 4 months ago | parent | next [-] | | Alpine is a great litmus test for programs that unnecessarily depends on glibc and systemd. More often than not, it’s easy to take the arch build script, and create a package for alpine. When that fails, it’s usually for the above reason. | |
| ▲ | troupo 4 months ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I want people who will actually use the package to package the software they need, and distro maintainer to supervise that. Erm... Your original comment said "you should not package for distros, distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources." > Yep, people who won't use Erlang shouldn't package Erlang. But on the other hand, developers who won't use Erlang on platform X shouldn't package Erlang on platform X. So... Who's gonna package it if you say that distros should package it? > The "we absolutely need flatpak because otherwise it fundamentally doesn't work" philosophy is, to me, very close to saying "we must consolidate everything under one single OS. Bullshit. What you advocate for is "why bother with ease of use and convenience, everyone should learn how to compile and package everything from scratch" > If you don't want to contribute to your distro The user of a package doesn't necessarily know how to package something, and shouldn't need to. | | |
| ▲ | palata 4 months ago | parent [-] | | > Erm... Your original comment said "you should not package for distros, distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources." Yes. I said "distros", not "the distro maintainers". The distro is the maintainers + the packagers, and packagers can be random contributors (I package stuff for my distro when needed, but I am not a distro maintainer). > So... Who's gonna package it if you say that distros should package it? People who will use Erlang on that particular distro. Under the supervision of the distro maintainers. There is typically some kind of hierarchy where there are the "community" packages that are just "untested" (sometimes they can get promoted to a more trusted level), and the "core" packages that are handled by the distro maintainers. > What you advocate for is "why bother with ease of use and convenience, everyone should learn how to compile and package everything from scratch" Not at all, but it seems like you don't know how it currently works in traditional distros, and you don't understand what I'm saying (probably I'm not being clear, that's on me). What I advocate seems absolute common sense: "the package maintainer(s) should understand and use the package on the distro for which is is packaged". The vast majority (probably almost the totality of) users of Ubuntu or Arch have never had a need to package anything, because everything is already there. Because those distros are very popular. Depending on your choice of distro, it may happen that a package hasn't been contributed or even that it doesn't compile (e.g. if you use musl). In that case, if you want it, you need to contribute it. But if you use musl, you implicitly accept this and are supposed to know what you are doing. > The user of a package doesn't necessarily know how to package something, and shouldn't need to. That's your opinion. I would say that a Gentoo user is expected to have some idea about compiling packages, otherwise they should not use Gentoo. Ubuntu is targetting people who don't want to know how it works, that's fine too. Diversity is good. What I don't like, is Windows-minded people ("I shouldn't have to understand how my computer works") who come to Linux and push for everybody to become like them. "We should all use systemd and Flatpak, and pay one team of 50 people who know how that works, and the rest of us should just use it and not know about it" -> I disagree with that. Those who think that should just use Ubuntu/Windows/macOS and leave me alone. And for those who use Ubuntu, they should remember that they don't pay for it next time they say "it's shit because it doesn't do exactly what I want". | | |
| ▲ | troupo 4 months ago | parent [-] | | > and packagers can be random contributors So who's going to maintain the packages? Who's going to test them against other packages? Against distro upgrades? Who's going to fix issues? > Not at all, but it seems like you don't know how it currently works in traditional distros I do. A small number of people are doing the thankless job of packaging, maintaining, fixing, testing a multitude of packages. And their efforts are needlessly duplicated across several packaging systems. > What I don't like, is Windows-minded people ("I shouldn't have to understand how my computer works") who come to Linux and push for everybody to become like them What I don't like is people assuming ill intent behind "you know what would be great? If we didn't assume that every user has to package their own packages across 15 different incompatible packaging systems". | | |
| ▲ | palata 4 months ago | parent [-] | | > So who's going to maintain the packages? Who's going to test them against other packages? Against distro upgrades? Who's going to fix issues? I feel like you're not reading what I'm writing. The community. That's how open source works: if you use an open source project and it has a bug, you can fix it and open an MR. If the upstream project doesn't want your fix, you can fork. Nothing forces the upstream project to accept your contributions. When they do, they take the responsibility for them (to some extent, as in: it is now part of their codebase). If your distribution doesn't have a package you want, you can make it for yourself, locally. You can contribute it to a community repo (most distros have that). Maybe at some point, the distro maintainers will decide to take over your package in a more official repo, maybe not. Even if you are not the official maintainer of a package, if you use it and see a problem, you can contribute a fix. In the open source world, most people are freeriders. A (big) subset of those feel entitled and are simply jerks. And a minority of people are not freeriders and actually contribute. That's the deal. > And their efforts are needlessly duplicated across several packaging systems. No! No no no no! If they don't want to put efforts into that, they don't have to. They could use Ubuntu, or Windows, or macOS. If they contribute to, say, Alpine or Gentoo, that's because they want to. I am not on Gentoo in the hope that it will become Ubuntu, that would be weird. But you sound like you want to solve "my Gentoo problems" by making it look more like Ubuntu (in the idea). Don't use Gentoo if you don't want to, and leave me alone! Don't try to solve my problems, you're not even a Gentoo user. | | |
| ▲ | troupo 4 months ago | parent [-] | | > That's how open source works: Funny how in reality it's not how open source works. Packages are en masse packaged and maintained by a very small number of maintainers doing a thankless job. Not by some "community" where "a person who uses the package" suddenly wakes up nad says "you know, I'm going to package this piece of software" This is literally the reason for my exmaple with Erlang in my original comment. > n the open source world, most people are freeriders. I'm getting tired of your rants and tangents > No! No no no no! If they don't want to put efforts into that, they don't have to. They could use Ubuntu You're deliberately missing and/or ignoring the point. Ho many package managers and package format are there? Packaging some code for each of them is wasted/duplicated effort because it's doing the same thing (packaging) for the same code (for example, Erlang) for literally the same operating system (Linux) just because someone has a very subjective view of "the one true correct way". So now you have someone packaging, say, Erlang, for dpkg, flatpack, nix, pacman, rpm, snap and probably a few others because "people are not freeloaders" or "non-windows-minded people" or some other stream of consciousness. > Don't use Gentoo if you don't want to, and leave me alone! Don't try to solve my problems, you're not even a Gentoo user. I've said all I had to say. You deliberately chose to talk only to the voices in your head. Sorry, I'm not privy to those voices. So, adieu. | | |
| ▲ | palata 4 months ago | parent [-] | | > Funny how in reality it's not how open source works. Let me copy the full sentence, with the part that you conveniently truncated: "That's how open source works: if you use an open source project and it has a bug, you can fix it and open an MR. If the upstream project doesn't want your fix, you can fork. Nothing forces the upstream project to accept your contributions. When they do, they take the responsibility for them (to some extent, as in: it is now part of their codebase)." Can you explain to me how this is wrong? > I'm getting tired of your rants and tangents How is that a rant? That's almost by design: I make my code open source so that people can benefit from it for free under some conditions. Take the billions of computers running Linux. Which proportion of those are run by people who actually contribute to Linux, do you think? As a good approximation, it's ~0%. Almost all users of Linux don't contribute to Linux. It's a fact, not a rant. Nowhere did I say that people should contribute. > Ho many package managers and package format are there? Who cares? If I want to create a new package manager with a new package format, why would you forbid me from doing it? That's my whole point: people are free to do whatever they want. Are you saying that I must use Flatpak instead of my favourite package manager because you have decided that it was better for everybody? Why do you stop at package managers? In your view, isn't having different OSes is wasted/duplicated effort? Should we all just use Windows because it's your favourite and you don't understand why other people may have other preferences? > Sorry, I'm not privy to those voices. My point is that whenever somebody says "it's stupid, we should all use X", my answer is always "If Y, Z, A, B, C, ... exist, it's because other people, for some reasons, don't want X. Because you like X doesn't mean that everybody should like X. I see how it would be convenient for you if everybody used exactly your favourite system, but the reality is that we can't all love exactly the same things. Hence there are alternatives. Diversity is good". Diversity is good. I don't say that Flatpak should not exist. I just say that whoever wants me to use Flatpak is fundamentally missing something. |
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